Lainatun viestin kirjoitti alkujaan Tricky Buddha
GRAPHICS
One thing I kept meaning to pay a bit of attention to but most of the time didn't was the 8km draw distance thing. For what it's worth, I didn't notice any pop in of any kind.
The frames seemed pretty good to me. In fact, the demo movie that played on the big screen seemed to be of lesser quality to the game itself. Hrm!
Sadly, I'm not so proficient at being a graphics whore so it is hard for me to really say with any level of authority.
I will say that walking through water looked a lot like Dark Alliance. It left a nice trail in the water as you moved that looked sharp. The water was also on par with Dark Alliance in terms of quality and reflection to my, again, extremely untrained eye. However, unlike PoP, when you get out of the water you're completely dry. You're also dry while in the water.
Textures seemed sharp, too, sharper than Doom III, in my opinion. Or was it Quake III? Whichever Xbox game they had for this E3 that people are excited over. In that one, when you got the camera too close to something, it tended to look pixelated and icky. I didn't notice that much at all with Fable, so BBB seems to be pulling off the Xbox's limitations better than some of the competition.
Animations on the characters were pretty smooth, too. Poor animations in Morrowind tended to bother me, but it was good stuff in Fable.
The wood on things like fences and houses looked nice, and I love the style of the art. A lot of the screenshots look, well, goofy with elongated body parts and huge feet and such. When you're actually playing, or watching a video of the game, you can tell the screenshots are just somehow odd.
Best graphics on the Xbox? I'd say it was up there with the best. There's not really a lot of RPGs out for Xbox, and you have to compare it with RPGs because you're using so much of the memory on things that don't exist in other games, such as NPC pathfinding, combat AI, and so on. It was definitely on par with KotOR, if not a little bit better - and actually a good bit better in some ways, such as the water which was more like Dark Alliance. It was also colorful, which made it, to me, more interesting and better looking than Morrowind.
I'm also hoping for a lot of cutscenes because they were really well done.
The player model (the hero) was amazing, and definitely better than any in any other RPG I have seen, and probably about as good as what I have seen of the Prince in Prince of Persia - except the player in Fable morphs so that gives it a thumbs up over the Prince, while the Prince probably has a ton more animations, giving it the thumbs up.
Oh! The grass! When you walked through the grass, it moved out of your way. It looked pretty sharp. And as I mentioned before, as you moved through the water it left trails behind you that looked really, really nice. True you don't slow down (the water was likely too shallow to slow you down, anyway) or get wet, but I think those are very minor graphical points that almost no one does.
The areas were somewhat small-ish. The area that the boy starts in, the small village, you could get to any point from any other point within about 20 seconds or so. It was basically shaped like a trident, or a U with a third path running the middle. On the left end, up a hill, was your house. At the base was the warehouse. There was a neat bridge that reminded me of the Sleepy Hollow bridge (a bridge with a roof). You couldn't leave this area for that demo. The bandit escort map was a little smaller, but there were, I think, 4 maps that you transitioned through. It was the same with the graveyard, where there were, I think, 2 maps.
The gore levels didn't seem too dramatic to me, but I stuck to the simple things. The other I played Fable thread mentioned a decapitation that I never managed to pull off. It all felt pretty good and solid, though, when you hit someone. I thought it was good stuff. To be honest, Jade Empire looked really icky gruesome. Every other person you hit either lost their head and featured a 20 foot tall geyser of blood, or exploded into chicken legs that bounced around the screen amidst a splatter of blood. Crazy stuff, and I'm not sure that Fable is going for that same level of blood. But again, I missed out on decapitations, so I don't know for certain.
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SOUND
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I thought the voice acting was good. Reminded me of Black and White, though maybe it's because I'm from the US and these are two of the only games I've played with decent British voice actors.
I was thinking I'd have trouble gauging the sound/music at first. It was pretty noisy in there. The headphones that were provided only covered one ear, and were turned up so loud that they were sounding pretty awful. But even with the volume so high, it was still hard to hear over the background noise.
At the after hours thing, it was a bit more tolerable in there. I think the sound was pretty good and very background / natural sounding. A lot of the sounds in Morrowind bugged me almost right away, whereas the sounds in KotOR seemed to fit more. I felt the same way about Fable. I didn't have any concerns, myself. I haven't downloaded any of the video clips that have come out since E3, but maybe some will have sound and you can hear for yourself.